Friends
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #92, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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This one arrives a little later than usual. I was travelling back to Finland this week. And that has meant among other things, a lot of things to write about, but not that much time to write those things in. And so, here we are on the Air, at 22.46 on a Sunday. A Sunday that happens to be my 3rd anniversary.
I love you Prerna.
friends
We are a group of five friends. We were six in college, but then one went away and well what can you do.
What I try to do is call everyone of these people once a week - Saturdays usually. Usually one or two of these friends picks up and then we have a little chat.
After leaving college, we were lucky enough that all five of us were in the same city - Delhi - for a time. We would meet once every month at Sarthak’s place or mine. We would sit, eat, talk, play some Counter Strike.
These meetings took time and effort to set up. We were all working now. I would get angry if someone was not able to make it. Eventually, I realised it did not matter. We all had our lives. We all had priorities. So, the thing we agreed on was this - we would have a meeting once a month, we would publish it, and then if you could make it, great, if not, then that was also fine.
That has been my principle for these calls as well. Great if you can make it. Fine if you can’t. I will talk to whoever picks up.
Saurabh, the friend who got married now, was not in any of these calls since maybe the past two years. We would often talk about what was going on. If anyone knew what was going on.
Sarthak and I met him for a bachelor’s of sorts a few days before his marriage. It felt as if we had just picked up from where we had left of. He was so happy, visibly so. I was so happy to share this space with them.
Uchit arrived from Japan on 8th. We met on 10th, a day before Saurabh’s wedding reception in Delhi. On an unconnected note, receptions are boring. Nothing happens. You eat, drink and maybe dance. Have cocktail parties instead.
Back to Uchit. I am physically meeting Uchit after five years, maybe more. We talk on phone. But the stars never seemed to have aligned in the past. They did this time.
I had messaged Sarthak in advance that we will have a bonfire on his roof. A thing we used to do in winter months in Delhi. There are so many memories I have of these meetings.
So we did. We sat around a bonfire. And we talked. There was a nip in the air around us. But the fire provided the requisite warmth. And we were happy.
Someone said that we don’t get to do this anymore. Maybe it was me. I don’t have friends I can sit around a bonfire with. I don’t have friends I can bare my soul to. And I miss that. I could talk about anything with these friends of mine.
And just for a little while, I was back in that little pocket of time, when I could. And it was pure bliss.
The return to Finland was a tense affair.
I had left home three hours before my flight. I should have kept more. The Indigo counter was full of people. I tried talking to some people, but they just said, they will call out when end time is near.
They did. My luggage was over limit. 32 kgs is the absolute maximum they will allow in planes. I had to do an emergency shuffle. I was sweating and angry. In the end I had to carry a bunch of books in my arms through immigration and security.
The flight was delayed by around 90 mins. Half of my layover was spent in the plane. I spent the rest rushing through the Istanbul airport. Thankfully, I did not have to go from F zone to A.
I landed in Finland around six in the evening. I got into a cab and was home by around 19:30. I changed, ate a little and was in the sauna by 20:00.
The sauna felt nice at the end of an approximately 16 hour travel.
It’s nice to be back here. The snow just makes the dark months a bit brighter.
/five things to share
1. Stop generating, start thinking - localghost
In the wake of the Horizon scandal, where innocent Post Office staff went to prison because of bugs in Post Office software that led management to think they’d been stealing money, we need to be thinking about our software more than ever: we need accountability in our software.
Nice write up. I see the same points that I’ve seen elsewhere. I don’t think it’s the engineers driving this revolution though. It’s the business leaders doing that. There is a fomo in the industry - people are committed to AI without having any use case for it.
Regarding accountability it will fall on the reverse-centaurs, the people left to deal with the large amounts of AI generated work. Nobody will say Claude made a mistake, it’s the employees who made mistakes by not verifying what was generated. It will not be a great place, but we are barreling toward it.
2. How iPhones Made a Surprising Comeback in China by Zeyi Yang
But Apple’s product strategy wasn’t the only important factor here. The iPhone 17 was priced low enough to qualify for a massive electronics subsidy program launched by the Chinese government last year. To help stimulate the economy, Beijing spent some $43 billion subsidizing domestic purchases of electronics, appliances, and cars in 2025. Smartphones sold for less than 6,000 RMB (about $860) were eligible for up to a 15 percent discount. Apple listed the iPhone 17 in China for 5,999 RMB, ensuring price-sensitive buyers would be able to benefit from the government policy.
A combination of good product, subsidies by the government and people being in the upgrade cycle since their last phones were the iPhone 13 series.
3. Vibe coding Nothing’s apps is fun, until you try to make them useful by Robert Hart
The second issue is a potentially fatal hurdle for a project like this: me. I’ve been reporting on AI tools for years, and one pattern keeps repeating—no matter how capable a system is, the hardest part is knowing how to use it to its potential. I immediately ran into that using Nothing’s Essential App Builder. It seems very capable and has great potential, but I didn’t always know what I wanted, and when I did, I didn’t always know how to ask for it. An ecosystem built on vibes is a great idea, but sometimes vibes aren’t enough.
Good to know that there may yet be a future for us techies.
4. Pluralistic: Europe takes a big step towards a post-dollar world (11 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Once Trump tried to steal Greenland, it became apparent that the downsides of the dollar far outweigh its upsides. Last month, Christine Lagarde (president of the European Central Bank) made a public announcement on a radio show that Europe “urgently” needed to build its own payment system to avoid the American payment duopoly, Visa/Mastercard
5. Threads’ new ‘Dear Algo’ feature lets you tell the algorithm what you want to see by Jay Peters
To use the feature in a public post, type “Dear Algo” and then a description of what you want Threads’ algorithm to show you more of. Once you make your request, the change will stick for three days so you can see how it changes your feed. If you want to see more of the new content in your feed over the long term, interact with those posts.
It sounds like a good feature - a good use of LLMs. It is still opaque though.
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Until next week.